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A decade after the publication of Haussmann, or the Distinction, his acclaimed novel about nineteenth-century Paris, Paul La Farge turns his imagination to America at the dawn of the twenty-first century.In September 2000, a young programmer comes home from a festival in the Nevada desert and learns that his grandfather has died, and that he has to return to Thebes, a town which is so isolated that its inhabitants have their own language, in order to clean out the house where his family lived for five generations. While he’s there, he runs into Yesim, a Turkish American woman whom he loved as a child, and begins a romance in which past and present are dangerously confused. At the same time, he remembers San Francisco in the wild years of the Internet boom, and mourns the loss of Swan, a madman who may have been the only person to understand what was happening to the city, and to the world.Luminous Airplanes has a singular form: the novel, complete in itself, is accompanied by an online “immersive text,” which continues the story and complements it. Nearly ten years in the making, La Farge’s ambitious new work considers large worlds and small ones, love, memory, family, flying machines, dance music, and the end of the world.
Following the death of his grandfather, a young programmer returns to his isolated ancestral home in Thebes, only to find his past and present colliding through a rekindled romance and haunting memories of the dot-com boom. The protagonist must navigate the physical decay of his family estate while grappling with the psychological weight of his history in San Francisco. He is opposed by the blurring lines between his current reality and the fragmented memories of his friend Swan, a visionary figure from the internet era. The narrative framework utilizes a dual-layered approach, blending the printed novel with an expansive online component to reflect the protagonist's fractured perception of time and technology.
This work is characterized by its ambitious structural experimentation and its dense, contemplative prose style. The narrative suggests a preoccupation with the intersection of personal history and the broader, often chaotic, evolution of the digital age. Readers likely find the interplay between the physical book and the online immersive text to be a central, defining feature of the reading experience. The thematic focus on loss, memory, and the fragility of human understanding positions the novel as a complex meditation on the transition into the new millennium.
Page Count:
245
Publication Date:
2012-01-01
Publisher:
Fourth Estate
ISBN-10:
0007459548
ISBN-13:
9780007459544
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